Uncontainable

One of the things I love about the sea - well, about the world really - is the way it simply defies containment. We can make boundaries of and for things, but unless we work hard to keep them as we wish, they simple crumble away, or grow over, or spill out, or flood. That idea makes me think of parts of Robert Frost's poem Mending Wall:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, 

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, 

And spills the upper boulders in the sun; 

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

...

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know 

What I was walling in or walling out, 

And to whom I was like to give offense. 

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, 

That wants it down.

The shifting, changing nature of the sea - where the water line will be each day, each month, each season; the shifting sands; the currents that bring weeds, bluebottles, whales, warmth - all of it is far beyond my control, and that is something that I fear and love.

And that is what I thought about when I saw these artworks by Ana Teresa Barboza (via demilked).

 

 

In an interview (that includes many more of her works), she explains these pieces in terms of their craft and construction:

Both embroidery and crocheting are techniques that require time. I use these techniques in order to make a connection between manual work and the processes of nature; creating thread structures similar to the structures that make a plant for example. My aim is to create pieces of work that simulates experiments, aiming to reconstruct nature, teaching us to have a new and fresh look at it.

I like her points about this. But from where I'm sitting, what I see is the way that we can never really contain a place - not in an artwork, image or by building walls. And the minute that it breaks those boundaries the edges of things (of what we know or hoped to achieve) become less clear. They take a less defined form and fill space in new ways. 

I've had these images open in a tab on my internet browser for days now, and I'm not yet bored of them. Imagine one of the pieces of the sea in your home, taking up space that was never meant for it, falling and unwinding, even as you try to keep it hanging and in some kind of form. I doubt the weight of the thread, or the loose construction of the weave would allow it to do that, even as a completed work. 

Pretty awesome, huh.